Archives for September, 2007

There was something sad yet slightly poignant about watching President Bush’s speech on Iraq last night. I thought Andrew Sullivan got the atmospherics exactly right: He seemed almost broken to me. His voice raspy, his eyes watery, his affect exhausted, his facial expression almost bewildered. I thought I would feel angry; but I found myself…

The new Kanye West album is solid, although it could use a dose of ironic humor. But that’s neither here nor there. What interests me about Kanye is his masterful ability to embed hooks and samples into the background of his songs. He’ll literally repeat the same three second acoustic loop over and over again,…

Just a quick note on the liberal/conservative psychological study that everyone is talking about. (Dave Munger has a thorough write-up here.) Color me dubious. My own bias is to distrust any experiment that tries to collapse extremely complex cognitive categories – such as political belief – into a simple and quantifiable experimental paradigm. The research…

Boy, was Descartes wrong. His philosophy of duality divided our being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a mortal carcass. The soul was the source of reason, science and everything nice. Our flesh, on the other hand, was “clocklike,” just a machine that bleeds. With this schism, Descartes condemned the body to a…

There are so many stupid studies of the gendered brain that it’s easy to conclude that good research into psychological sex differences is impossible. But that would be a mistake. I think one of most interesting recent investigations into the cognitive differences of men and women comes from a clever neuroeconomics experiment, designed by Colin…

Yawning is famously contagious. Except that is, if you’re autistic. Here’s Mindhacks: The study showed that children with autism were far less likely to yawn in response to watching others do the same. Often, autistic social difficulties are put down to a problem with ‘theory of mind’ the ability to understand other people’s beliefs, intentions…

From Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz: Sooner of later, everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is…

In my post on warm milk and sleepiness – the dairy acts like a placebo – a commenter made an astute point: what does “placebo” mean in that context? If you have developed the pathways that insist on Warm Milk = Time to Sleep, that effect is very real… Whether purely conditioned, or based on…

From Tyler Cowen: 1. In Danish data, if a CEO’s child dies, the value of that CEO’s company falls by one-fifth in the following two years. 2. If a CEO’s wife dies, the value of that CEO’s company falls by fifteen percent. 3. If a CEO’s mother-in-law dies, the value of that CEO’s company rises…